‘You too,’ Vince says without conviction.
‘See you, Kate. Bye.’ And then he’s gone, leaving Vince and me occupying what had felt like a normal smallish sofa, and now seems more suited to a doll’s house.
‘So...’ I start.
‘I just...’ He exhales, placing his mug on the wooden floorboards. ‘I just wanted to see you, Kate. But I’ll leave right now if you want me to.’
‘Of course I don’t want that,’ I say, adding quickly, ‘not after you’ve come all this way—’
‘I’m not expecting to stay here,’ he adds. He leans forwards, placing his hands over his face momentarily.
‘Oh, Vince. It’s okay.’ When he takes his hands away I see that his eyes are wet. ‘Please. Don’t get upset...’
‘Are you with him?’ He looks anguished now. ‘WithFergus,I mean?’
‘We’re friends, Vince.’ Of course it’s not the whole truth, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
‘D’you often hang out after work? Up here, I mean?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Have you slept with him, Kate? Please tell me. I won’t do anything—’
‘Vince, please stop this! You can’t do this. You can’t appear suddenly and start interrogating me. It’s not fair. I’m sorry if you’re hurt and upset, but—’
‘No,I’msorry.’ He rubs at his eyes with his knuckles. ‘I think I must’ve gone a bit mad to do this. To come up here, I mean, and spring myself on you. I should go home right now—’
‘Don’t be crazy.’ I touch his arm gently. ‘You’re not going home. You wouldn’t be able to get back tonight anyway. How about we go down the road and have a drink? The pub’s lovely and they have rooms upstairs. You could stay there. I’m sure they won’t be booked up at this time of year...’
He nods sheepishly, picks up his mug of tepid tea and sets it down again. ‘Okay. If you want to.’
‘I think that might be best.’ I pause. ‘And we can spend some time together, okay? We can talk things through.’ I muster a smile, and Vince manages one too. He takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘I’ve really missed you, Kate,’ he says simply.
I look at him, all tired and rumpled, his reddish hair long outgrown its cut. ‘It’s good you’re here,’ I tell him. ‘We do need to talk. So, come on. I think we could both do with a drink.’
*
It’s not the big and serious stuff we discuss, tucked away at the corner table in the pub. It’s not ‘Why did you leave me?’, ‘Are we getting divorced?’ or ‘How are we going to divide everything up?’
Instead Vince tells me, with a note of pride, how he’d found me. How he’d deduced that the ‘big house’ I’d mentioned was some way out of town, and that the owner and I were probably clearing it out in readiness for it being put up for sale. Then he’d googled estate agents and there it was: Osprey House. He’d been so thrilled to find it that he’d come off the site and booked his train tickets immediately. An open return, so he could stay as long as he wanted to. Or needed to, I suspect, in order to persuade me to go home.
‘It was a mad, spontaneous thing,’ he explains. ‘Once I’d decided, that was that. I just had to find someone to take care of Jarv...’
So it’s ‘Jarv’ now. That makes me smile. Something seems to have changed in Vince. ‘It was a bit of a palaver,’ he adds. ‘I asked Deborah but of course she’s out at work all day...’
‘I guess the Kemps are too,’ I remark.
‘Um, yeah.’ He colours slightly and looks down at his hands. ‘Gail and Mehmet said they’d love to help, but only if he could stay in our house rather than theirs. They’d just pop in to walk and feed him, all that...’
‘Oh no,’ I exclaim.
‘No, exactly. Couldn’t leave him all on his own.’ His mouth twists into a smile, as if he’s about to divulge something. ‘You won’t believe it but... he’s been sleeping on our bed. I meanmybed,’ he adds quickly, and my heart squeezes a little.
‘You’ve been letting him sleep with you?’ I’d be no more surprised if he’d said they’d started sharing a dinner plate.
‘Yeah.’ Vince grins now, and relief settles over me. He’s okay, I tell myself. He hasn’t fallen apart.
‘You used to say, “Would you take a calf from a farmyard and dump it on a human bed?”’ I tease him. Vince was always disgusted when he heard about dogs sleeping with their humans.
